Thomas Massie, elected Republican from Kentucky, is a fierce opponent of the health policy led by United States President Joe Biden. This Sunday, the 51-year-old man tweeted to express his dissatisfaction, believing he was quoting Voltaire to illustrate his point. Problem, Thomas Massie took up a quote from Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi accused of pedophilia.
“To find out who governs you, just find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” the elected American cracked on Twitter, believing he was quoting the Enlightenment philosopher.
Unfortunately, no trace of Voltaire in this quote, since it was pronounced in 1993 by Kevin Alfred Strom, convicted in 2008 for possession of child pornography.
The latter had mentioned this sentence during a radio program with an anti-Semitic tendency. He was also referring to the Jewish people, who he said ruled the country and could not be criticized. Antisemitic remarks therefore, then attributed to Voltaire by the meanders of the Internet.
You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science. pic.twitter.com/KnqCcPXWSe
—Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) January 30, 2022
Denied in 2017
They are the researcher Nicholas Cronk, director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford, as well as Edward Langille, professor of French at the University of Saint Francis Xavier and co-author of the book: “The Quotable Voltaire”, who have successively denied, from 2017, the attribution of these words to the philosopher of the Enlightenment.
For its part, the office of Thomas Massie did not wish to react to this error, and the tweet was not deleted, despite the bad buzz it caused.
It is not the first time that a politician has made this mistake, since already in 2015 an Australian senator was forced to delete his tweets after falsely quoting the philosopher.
As for Thomas Massie, he is not at his first attempt either, since last August he was strongly criticized for having tweeted an image which compared the vaccination pass to the numbers tattooed by the Nazis on the detainees. concentration camps during World War II.